Presence and conversation are two important communication services in both the public internet and the telecom networks. The majority of the existing Presence and Conversation services create significant traffic flows in the network, using IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or other session-based protocol. Extra system capacity is required to handle these overhead network traffics, which increases the overall cost to deploy IMS-based presence or conversation service in the operator network.
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture consisting of clients initiating requests to servers, servers processing the requests, and returning appropriate responses. Requests and responses are built around the transfer of representations of resources. A representation of a resource is typically a message or a document that captures the current state of a resource. At any particular time, a client can either be waiting for a response to an outstanding request or “at rest”. A client in a rest state is able to interact with its user, but creates no load and consumes no per-client storage on the servers or on the network. No session state or client context is stored on the server between requests. An architecture which conforms to REST constraints is referred to as being RESTful.
At present, there is no mechanism supported by open standards bodies in the communication network space that provides for a lightweight, stateless presence and conversation service.
Accordingly, it should be readily appreciated that it would be advantageous to have a solution for reducing the network traffic flows generated and network resources utilized by the presence and conversation services by using a passive approach.